The World

Braganzas and Zulus, Albanians, Dahomeans and Vanderbilts

THE LIBERATORS: BOLíVAR AND PEDRO

Around 13 October 1822, high in the Andes, at Loja (Ecuador), a desiccated, exhausted and feverish soldier inspected his troops. Later in a delirium he dreamed of climbing the volcano of Chimborazo, ‘giant of the earth’. On reaching its summit, ‘I fell in a swoon … I felt as if inflamed by strange, supernatural fire. The God of Colombia had taken possession of me. Suddenly Time stood before me …’

‘I am the father of centuries!’ said the God.

‘Surely, oh Time,’ he replied, ‘the miserable mortal who has climbed this high must perish!’

‘Hide not the secrets which Heaven has revealed to you! Speak the truth to mankind!’

The delirious dreamer was not some tripping pre-hippy but Simón Bolívar, El Libertador, the thirty-nine-year-old president of the vast Republic of Gran Colombia, who in the most extraordinary career of his time had liberated much of south America and was now focusing on Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia. He had conquered a million square miles, an area larger than Europe, mastering jungles, deserts and mountains, freeing millions from slavery. Few, other than an Alexander, a Genghis, a Napoleon, had experienced such triumphs, but Bolívar was more sensitive, less coarse, more aesthetic than the others.

Born into luxury, Bolívar, five foot six, wiry with burning eyes and skinny legs, was exuberant, passionate and boundlessly confident: he had tempered his slight body in order to compete with hardened cowboys, once mounting his horse with his hands bound behind his back and another time riding into a river with both his hands tied to show his virtuosity: ‘Don’t think this sort of thing isn’t useful in a leader.’ He had given away his money; he lived on horseback with the roughest gauchos. ‘What?’ cried a Spaniard who wanted to see the Liberator. ‘That little man … riding the mule?’

After each victory, Simón was mobbed by female admirers who dressed in white to greet the Liberator as he took each town, every victory celebrated with a ball. ‘There are men who need to be alone and far from the hubbub to think,’ he said, but ‘I deliberated best when I was the centre of revelry, amid the pleasures of a ball.’ He never doubted his destiny. ‘A strong man delivers a single blow,’ he wrote, magniloquently, ‘and an empire vanishes.’

Bolívar’s father, Juan Vicente, bitterly resented the corrupt direction of their Spanish masters. ‘Injustice,’ whispered the colonials, ‘means Revolution.’^* Juan begged his friend, the radical Francisco de Miranda, to lead a revolution against Spain, a dangerous enterprise.^*

Simón Bolívar lost both parents young, leaving him a wealthy orphan, raised by a black slave Hippolyta, educated by Enlightened scholars and running wild with street children. Bolívar ‘thought of little else’ other than liberating Latin America: ‘I was fascinated by stories of Greek and Roman heroes,’ while ‘Washington awoke a desire in me to be just like him.’ Many creoles were restrained by fear of race war: one in ten Venezuelans were enslaved. Yet Bolívar was proud of a pedigree that included an enslaved girl. ‘Our people are nothing like Europeans or North Americans,’ he mused, ‘we’re more a mixture of Africa and America.’

At fifteen, Bolívar sailed to Madrid, where he met Queen Luisa because her latest lover was a Venezuelan – this was when he hit the crown prince with his racket. After a spree of love affairs, Bolívar married a young Caracan mantuano, but his wife soon died of yellow fever. She was the love of his life, ‘but had I not become a widower’, he wrote, ‘I’d never have been General Bolívar, El Libertador. The death caused me early in the road of politics to follow the chariot of Mars.’

In 1807, Napoleon’s drubbing of the risible Spanish king broke the fear necessary for the survival of empires: the Caracas grandees set up a junta loyal to the king, sending Bolívar to London where he pleaded in vain for support from Marquess Wellesley and met his ageing hero Miranda. The pair joined forces, sailing home to launch revolution, but Generalissimo Miranda, now sixty, offended everyone and was outmanoeuvred by the Spanish. Bolívar probably betrayed the eclipsed dictator, arresting him just before the Spanish swooped. Miranda died in a Spanish jail, and Bolívar took command of a rebel army.

Like the French in Haiti, the Spaniards fought differently in the colonies: they massacred 12,000, flaying rebels, wearing their ears on their hats. ‘Spaniards, count on death,’ declared Bolívar, ‘even if you’ve been indifferent. Americans: count on life even if you have been guilty!’ In August 1813, he took Caracas, but the llaneros, the mixed-race cowboys of the plains, backed the Spanish. Their Army of Hell routed the rebels. Bolívar escaped Caracas with his family, mistress and beloved manumitted nurse Hippolyta. Executing 1,000 Spaniards on the way, he made his way to Haiti, where President Pétion – the Papa Bon Coeur of the Haitian revolution – befriended him. ‘I could feel his greatness,’ said Pétion, who demanded nothing except the liberation of all slaves.

‘European ambition forced the yoke of slavery on the rest of the world,’ agreed Bolívar, already an abolitionist, ‘and the rest of the world was obliged to answer.’ He never forgot that ‘Pétion is the true liberator.’

In December 1816, armed with Haitian guns, Bolívar returned to Venezuela. ‘I decree full liberty to all slaves,’ he declared, launching a war of elimination of his own, uniting armies of creoles, ex-slaves, llaneros and British mercenaries in a tireless campaign against Spain. El Libertador took the war into New Granada (Colombia), winning at Boyacá on his horse Palomo, capturing Bogotá.

In June 1821, Bolívar won the decisive battle at Carabobo that expelled Spain from Caracas and was then elected president of a new republic called Gran Colombia. Exhausted, drawn, greying, he admitted, ‘I am consumed by the demon of war, determined to finish the struggle.’ As he explained, ‘My doctor often told me my spirit needs to feed on danger. This is so true. When God brought me into the earth, he brought a storm of revolutions to feed off. I am the genius of the storm.’

In Spain, a revolution had undermined the rule of King Fernando. Now the storm-born Liberator crossed over snow-capped Andes and tropical jungles to attack the Spanish in Peru. Sharing the tribulations of his troops, he defeated the Spanish at Bombona and contemplated Chimborazo, just as a very different Liberator was declaring the independence of Brazil in a splurge of dysentery.

The other Liberator would never have conquered a half a continent nor spoken to a god on a volcano – and he was neither a revolutionary nor an abolitionist. In fact, he was a Braganzan prince and the owner of thousands of slaves, and the liberation of Brazil could not have been more different.

Prince Pedro was playful and informal, keen on singing and playing guitar, usually dressed in a boater, white cotton trousers and a striped jacket. Nine years old when he arrived in Rio, he relished the city’s hedonistic informality, chatting to passers-by in the streets and plunging in semi-disguise into its bars and bordellos; he also took a French actress as his mistress. Unlike his father King João, Pedro had adopted the Brazilian taste for washing. But while he counted himself a sort of liberal, he beat his slaves and revelled in his sexual mastery over enslaved women, whom he often spotted and bought in the street.

João remained in Brazil and negotiated his son’s marriage to an Austrian Habsburg. Kaiser Franz had already married one daughter to Napoleon; now he agreed to marry Marie Louise’s younger sister, Leopoldina, a fair, slim, dutiful and cheerful twenty-year-old, to the louche Pedro, nineteen at the time. Metternich was exasperated by the negotiations – ‘The Portuguese are the slowest people in the world!’ – and then by the archduchess herself: ‘I’ve never seen a more spoilt and foolish child … If I was her father, I’d beat her.’

Leopoldina, close to her sister Marie Louise, was excited by the adventure of Brazil, learning Portuguese, studying botany and the works of the travelling naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, though her views were romanticized. ‘Europe has become unbearable,’ she wrote, while Brazilian ‘savages’ were ‘children of nature not yet corrupted by luxury’. Sensing the ‘corruption’ of Brazil, she declared, ‘I’ll conduct myself with all possible modesty,’ eschewing ‘any literature that excites sensuality’.

As she arrived in November 1817 to popular excitement, King João had just put down a revolt in Pernambuco and sent away Pedro’s French actress. After a wedding night when she was undressed by her mother-in-law and sisters-in-law, Leopoldina was shocked by the pettiness of the palaces, the stink of her ill-washed father-in-law and her husband’s coarseness.

Pedro swore blindly, sketched pornography, loathed his ‘bitch’ of a mother, urinated off verandas, defecated in full view of his troops. ‘I am entranced by the country,’ Leopoldina wrote bravely. ‘I spend my days making music with my husband.’ But to her sister Marie Louise, she admitted, ‘In all honesty, he speaks his mind with a certain brutality; he’s accustomed to doing exactly what he wants,’ but ‘he loves me tenderly’. She added, addressing the woman who had survived Napoleon: ‘You are indeed right, true happiness doesn’t exist.’ The couple’s attitudes to their slaves were different: ‘She was always very kind when she passed us slaves,’ recalled a slave at their country house. ‘He was arrogant, walked around with a silver-topped cane and beat us.’ She was perpetually pregnant and depressed.

Then suddenly in 1820 revolution broke out in Portugal, the start of a long struggle between constitutional liberalism and royal absolutism exacerbated by Braganza feuds. The king agonized, before finally agreeing to return home, leaving the twenty-two-year-old Pedro as regent of Brazil. In Rio, the crowds shouted, ‘Let the people rule Brazil!’ and demanded that João embrace a liberal constitution yet remain in America. Pedro ordered his troops to shoot into the crowds. In April 1821, as he departed for Lisbon after thirteen years away, King João awkwardly told him, ‘Pedro, if Brazil breaks away, better it be by your hand, with the respect you have for me, than by the hand of one of these adventurers.’ Strangely the Brazilian revolution was now led by Pedro. When the Cariola crowds demanded he remain, he declared, ‘Tell the people, I stay.’

In August 1822, Regent Pedro visited São Paulo. Pedro had vacillated between independence and loyalty to his father, writing warm letters to him, telling him about his grandchildren and boasting about his sexual exploits with Carioca girls. Enduring his brutish behaviour, Leopoldina also pushed him towards independence. Toying with the idea, Pedro travelled through the provinces, winning support for himself and statehood, while enjoying the girls procured by his pandering secretary, ‘Fruity’ Gomes.

Near São Paolo, he ‘happened’ to encounter a litter borne by two slaves that contained Domitila de Castro, a beauty married to a provincial bully and sister of one of his courtiers. Dazzled, he dismounted, praised her and then insisted on bearing her litter himself.

‘How strong you are, Your Majesty,’ said Domitila.

‘Never again,’ he said, ‘will you be attended by little negroes like this.’

When he headed back to Rio, Domitila joined him in the great affair – selfish, passionate, destructive – of Brazilian history. The political pressure was rising. Out riding, he was just suffering a spasm of diarrhoea when he was handed a letter from Rio: Portugal was preparing to reconquer Brazil, just as Brazilian aristocrats were demanding full independence. There was not much of a choice, since he faced arrest if he resisted. Between spasms of dysentery, at a river called Ipiranga, he tore off the colours of Portugal, throwing his hat to the ground, drawing his sword and crying, ‘The time has come. Independence or death. We’ve separated from Portugal.’

In October 1822, Pedro was declared emperor of Brazil. ‘From Portugal we want nothing, absolutely nothing,’ Pedro wrote to his father. ‘Brazilian independence triumphs … or we die defending it.’ At his coronation on 1 December, Emperor Pedro fused Habsburg, Braganza and Amerindian themes, dressed in a green silk tunic, spurred boots and a green and yellow cloak made of toucan feathers. But his was not the first American monarchy.

QUEEN MARIE LOUISE OF HAITI AND THE GRAND LORD OF PARAGUAY: DR FRANCIA’S RACIAL EXPERIMENT

In Haiti, the visionary King Henry still ruled his northern kingdom; in the south, Bolívar’s ally ‘Papa Bon Coeur’ Pétion died, leaving power to his ally, Boyer, son of a French tailor and an enslaved Kongo woman.

In October 1820, Boyer orchestrated a coup against Henry. The king, autocratic and unpopular, suffered a stroke at Palais Sans-Souci and on 8 October shot himself with a golden bullet. He was swiftly buried up at his Citadelle. His heir, the sixteen-year-old prince royal, Victor Henry, was bayoneted; baron de Vastey was stabbed, then hurled down a well. Boyer, advised by his paramour Marie-Madeleine Lachenais, La Présidente de Deux Présidents, united north and south, then annexed Spanish Santo Domingo and welcomed 6,000 free African-Americans as colonists, an experiment that failed: 2,000 of them soon returned home.^* Yet France still claimed Haiti.

Haiti was not the only new state pioneering a post-slavery society.

Paraguay was trying a racial experiment unique to the continent, though ultimately with catastrophic consequences.

In October 1820, as Bolívar was conquering the continent and King Henry was facing mutiny, a studious and frugal doctor of theology, José Gaspar de Francia, who had become first a teacher then a lawyer, discovered a plot to assassinate him. The fifty-four-year-old had recently declared himself supreme dictator of a new state named Paraguay. Now he ordered his secret police, the Pyraguës (Hairy Feet), to arrest all the plotters and virtually everyone who was either educated or had played any political role. They were to be tortured in the Chamber of Truth and then killed. Since he prided himself on his husbandry, each executioner was permitted one bullet. Francia watched the killings sitting on a stool under an orange tree outside his palace. Beneath the death lists, Francia wrote unironically: ‘Pax Francia’.

Severe, dutiful and solemn, black-eyed with a penetrating and suspicious demeanour, often wearing his official uniform of blue-laced coat, waistcoat, breeches and white stockings, the doctor lived in his tiny, bungalow palace with just his widowed sister, two mixed-race maids (occasional mistresses), a young black barber-valet, a creole doctor and three Guaraní guards, trusties occasionally accused of treason and executed.

Francia was almost singlehandedly responsible for Paraguay, named after a Amerindian tribe, the Payaguá, which had resisted the early conquistadors. The remote Spanish territory Provincia Gigante de Indias was a backwater where a tiny elite of semi-educated creoles (Francia was one of only two university-educated doctors in the whole country) ruled encomienda estates, worked by African and Guaraní slaves. Ruled by Spanish viceroys in faraway Río de la Plata (Argentina), its capital Asunción contained just 3,500 creoles and 1,500 black people. Though the new republic was enriched by tobacco, its prosperous tranquillity was threatened by indigenous tribes, slave rebellions and Portuguese advances from Brazil.

El Supremo ruled the nation with barely a minister, observing the stars with astrolabes, studying and sketching botany, smoking his cigar and sucking up the national delicacy, the stimulating yerba mate tea, with a straw.^*

The creoles were heavily intermarried with the Guaraní but defended their racial superiority with touchy arrogance. When he entered public life in a bid for the chair of theology at the seminary, Francia, son of a creole officer and cruel estate manager, was accused of being mixed-race but insisted on his limpieza de sangre. After Spanish rule had been overthrown in Buenos Aires, the Paraguayans declared independence and Francia rose to power by shrewd patronage along with regular resignations and retirements to his little chacra (farm). In 1813 he was elected joint consul, setting up the first military division under his command, and then, outmanoeuvring rivals, in June 1816 he was elected perpetual dictator. The Guaraní were encouraged to call him the sacred Caraí Guazú (Grand Lord).

An obsessive micromanager, he was determined to create a Rousseauesque state of racial equality and national virtue. He controlled the trades of sugar cane, tobacco, cigars and yerba mate, which funded his new army, and decided to legislate a solution to racial caste by ending white supremacy. He banned any creoles or Spanish-born peninsulares from marrying other whites: they were ordered to marry only Amerindians or persons of colour. Enforced rigorously, Francia supervised every wedding, this terminated centuries of Spanish racial rule and produced a new mixed Paraguayan nation. Slavery was abolished, yet Francia’s forced labour in the plantations was not so different.

This sociological experiment created the most orderly nation in South America, which would endure under a quasi-monarchy for sixty peaceful years. Francia gloated over the disorder in the rest of the continent: ‘My policy for Paraguay’, he said, was ‘a system of non-intercourse with other Provinces of South America’ to prevent ‘contamination by that foul restless spirit of anarchy and revolution that has desolated and disgraced them all’.

MANUELA, THE LIBERATOR AND KING COTTON

In Peru the other Liberator, Bolívar, was watching the advance of a rival warlord. José de San Martín, commander of the Army of the Andes, dispatched by the rulers of Río de la Plata, had liberated Chile and advanced into Peru. But there he had run out of supplies. In July 1822, in a prickly meeting of titans, Bolívar outplayed San Martín. High in the Andes, Bolívar defeated the Spanish and then fell in love like never before.

Riding into Quito (Ecuador) the Liberator looked up at a balcony to see a young woman, Manuela Sáenz, who was watching his arrival. Soon afterwards they met at a ball. Manuela, an aristocrat’s illegitimate daughter married to a dull English merchant, was a gorgeous life force who now joined her life to his. She fought beside him in battle: ‘If my soldiers had your marksmanship,’ said Bolívar, promoting her to colonel, ‘we’d have routed Spain long ago.’ She served as his secretary, but infuriated him with her erotic adventures, taking female lovers including her two maids, black ex-slaves whom she dressed as Mamluks. Her passion exhausted him. ‘I want to answer, most beautiful Manuela, your demands of love,’ he begged. ‘My passion for you is wild,’ but ‘Give me time.’ In August 1824, leading his men into the mountains, Bolívar drove out the Spanish and was elected dictator of Peru and president of a new country named for himself, Bolivia. But Peru ‘contains two elements that are the bane of every just and free society’, said Bolívar, ‘gold and slaves. The first corrupts all it touches; the second is corrupt in itself.’

He might have been talking about America.

On 9 February 1825, the outgoing President James Monroe attended a dinner with his successor, president-elect John Quincy Adams – son of the second president – and his defeated rival, a rough frontier general named Andrew Jackson, in honour of the visiting marquis de Lafayette at which Bolívar was toasted as the ‘Washington of South America’. But their toasts to American liberty scarcely concealed the rising tensions between the spirit of continental conquest, Christian mission and the institution of slavery on one hand and the liberal values of American democracy on the other.

The abolitionists of the northern states tried to stop the slave owners of the south from extending slavery into the new states. Between 1820 and 1830, cotton production doubled in the south, requiring more slave labour. The slave trade had been banned, which meant that slaves were no longer worked to death and replaced; slaves lived longer and had children, making the trade less urgent. But the cruelties were no less atrocious as around 875,000 slaves were ‘sold down the river’ (the Mississippi, transported in steamships or coffles on foot) to toil in the cottonfields. But American slaves were inspired by the liberations achieved by Bolívar and Dessalines. Southern slave owners presented themselves as a courtly aristocracy in pillared mansions, but the genteelness was skin-deep, founded on racial violence – rebellions were savagely crushed. At the same time their culture of human ownership diminished their work ethic; they never invested in industry, and thus the enslaved society bore the seeds of its own defeat.

In 1820, a compromise was negotiated by which Maine as a non-slavery and Missouri as a slavery state joined the Union. ‘We have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go,’ Jefferson reflected.^* ‘Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.’ The compromise, ‘like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union … hushed indeed for the moment, but this is a reprieve only.’

Lafayette went on to Monticello to see Jefferson, and the two burst into tears as they hugged. Jefferson showed Lafayette around his university of Virginia, which he had designed as an invitation to youth to ‘come and drink of the cup of knowledge’. Yet his remodelled Monticello and his university campus were built by slaves, a fact that made Lafayette uneasy. On 4 July 1826, Jefferson died aged eighty-three, manumitting Madison and Eston, his two younger children with Sally (the two eldest children having already left Monticello) but not formally freeing Sally herself, and leaving catastrophic debts of $100,000 that led not just to the sale of Monticello but to the tragic auctioning of his slaves and the break-up of their families. Patsy, Jefferson’s daughter, allowed Sally to live in Charlottesville with Madison and Eston until she died. The two older Hemings children identified as white, and the younger ones as black, and they vanished into those two communities.

It was the end of a certain sort of America. Yet Lafayette also visited a very different sort of hero – General Jackson, at his Hermitage plantation in Tennessee. He represented the brash aggression of the frontier and the realm of King Cotton who sent his harvests to the Cottonopolis of Britain.

That spirit of liberty was abroad. Even affluent, victorious Britain seemed close to turmoil: protests seethed; armed rebellions were planned in Yorkshire and Shropshire; conspirators devised terrorist atrocities.

ROMANTICS AND THE MODERN NATION: LORD BYRON’S GREEK ADVENTURE AND BEETHOVEN’S NINTH

Lord Liverpool feared a British revolution. Britain was far from a democracy: around 400,000 men, a small proportion of the male population, enjoyed the vote. Grandees owned tiny ‘rotten boroughs’ that selected MPs: one estimate was that, of 515 MPs, 351 were chosen by 177 grandees. A typical rotten constituency, Higham Ferrers, owned by Earl Fitzwilliam, had only one voter, yet sent an MP to Westminster.

The movement for reform was propelled by the growth of the industrial cities. Manchester was the Cottonopolis and a dystopian ‘chimney of the world’. Every human invention has both improved life and endangered humanity and the environment: the factories created a new environment, a harsh, smoking and cruel world of ‘dark satanic mills’ for a new working class. As a visitor later put it, ‘Rich rascals, poor rogues, drunken ragamuffins and prostitutes form the moral; soot made into paste by rain, the physique, and the only view is a long chimney: what a place! The entrance to hell realised.’^*

In Manchester, on 16 August 1819, a crowd of 60,000 demanded reform of the franchise. Cavalry charged the crowd, killing seventeen and wounding over 400 – the Peterloo Massacre (only in Britain could eighteen deaths be called a ‘massacre’ or be compared to Waterloo) – which sparked more protests. Anxious to suppress radical propaganda, Liverpool cracked down with his Six Acts, which in February 1820 provoked a conspiracy to kill and behead the prime minister and prince regent. Police spies betrayed the thirteen conspirators, who were arrested in a raid by the early police force, the Bow Street Runners. Five of the conspirators, including William Davidson, son of a British planter in Jamaica and a black woman, were hanged, then after their death beheaded. Britain held on, but the pressure for reform was becoming unstoppable. In Europe, Metternich and his allies found it hard to repress a soaring spirit of freedom and sense of nation that combined into the thrilling, brooding movement of the Romantics.

On 6 March 1821, a Greek officer in the Russian army, Prince Alexander Ypsilantis, leader of a secret Greek organization, Filiki Etaireia, rode across the border from Russian Kishnev into Ottoman Jassy to announce a Greek revolution. ‘The hour has come,’ he wrote. ‘The enlightened peoples of Europe eagerly await the liberty of the Hellenes.’ In the following months, Greeks rebelled against the Ottoman sultan across the Greek world, which encompassed Phanar in Constantinople, Moldavia and Wallachia, as well as mainland Greece.^* The sultan cracked down: the Phanariots were publicly beheaded, the Orthodox patriarch was hanged from his own gate, the Greeks routed and massacred. But in Greece itself a medley of klepht brigands and Phanariot princes fought on – a spur to Romantic revolution. A thousand philhellenes rushed to fight for Greece – most famously the outrageous Romantic poet Lord Byron.

A lame, curly-haired, poetic celebrity, described as ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’ by one of his female lovers, delighted Romantics with his epic of the adventures of wild young man Childe Harold and had shocked British bourgeois by having affairs with boys and girls, culminating it was said in the seduction of his half-sister. In the wake of the ensuing outcry, he left to support Italian radicals in Italy, where he lived the Romantic dream, defining man as ‘Half dust, half deity, alike unfit / To sink or soar’. He hated Metternich and Liverpool.^* If the words were by Byron, the music was by Beethoven, whose wild-haired, half-mad, deaf genius personified tempestuous Romanticism. In May 1824, he premiered his Symphony No. 9, a celebration of freedom, using Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’, that could only be a criticism of Metternich’s system. ‘All men shall be brothers!’^*

In August 1823 the thirty-five-year-old Byron arrived in Cephalonia, Greece. Early the next year on the mainland, accompanied by his small Byron Brigade, he took joint command of Greek forces while falling passionately in love with his Greek page. The Romantic hero was planning an attack on Lepanto when he unromantically perished of dysentery. The rebellion intensified, watched with alarm by the Ottoman sultan and with uneasiness by Metternich, Liverpool and the new Russian tsar Nicholas I, a brother of Alexander. On his succession in December 1825, Nicholas – an imperious and magniloquent, strappingly good-looking, pewter-eyed martinet – faced a coup by liberal officers. It was a moment when Russia could have taken another route. Instead Nicholas crushed it with artillery and hangings. He took no chances at home, founding the first Russian political police, the Gendarmes, and the secret police, the Third Section of his personal chancellery, which started with just 416 employees. Such covert bureaucrats increasingly were not only tools of state power but represented its fearsome mystique too.

Starting with Alexander and continuing with Nicholas, the Romanov family beat the odds of biology by producing four conscientious, capable emperors in a row. Contemptuous of Britain’s chattering Parliament, loathing liberal views, despising his millions of Jews, Nicholas, a torchbearer for Russian autocracy, nationalism and Orthodoxy, embraced a mission of empire. Using his total command to outplay the inconsistent western democracies, he was an adept player of the World Game, crushing a Polish rebellion in 1830, seizing back the Caucasus from Persia, fighting a long war against Chechen jihadists and plotting to seize Constantinople.

His first chance came when Sultan Mahmud II recruited the dynamic Egyptian ruler Mehmed Ali to crush the Greek rebels. Mehmed dispatched his talented son Ibrahim the Red – named for his beard and his ferocity – to Greece where he systematically slaughtered the rebels, breaking the rebellion. The Greeks appealed to the Russians, the French and the British, who were all now sympathetic, for different reasons.

Nicholas, the Orthodox champion, saw the Greeks as a way to crack the Ottomans; in Britain, Parliament was dominated by George Canning, the bald, nervy, brilliant son of an impoverished Anglo-Irish vintner and an actress, who was tentative about reform at home but saw an opportunity for Britain in the new nations abroad – from Gran Colombia to Greece. ‘Our foreign policy cannot be conducted against the will of the nation,’ he said. In Greece, he joined forces with Nicholas, sending fleets to protect the Greeks. Mehmed Ali advised the sultan to be cautious, but was ignored.

At Navarino, on 20 October 1827, the Anglo-Franco-Russian fleet sank the Egyptian–Ottoman fleet – and Ibrahim returned to Egypt. Mehmed was incensed by the Ottoman folly. Canning and Nicholas now backed a new country – Greece – that was a new type of state, formed by self-determination, which aspired to recreate an ancient history, language and nation. It was the first of many which, over the next century, were relaunched out of the dynastic empires. A new way of imagining politics, it became the only way.

Canning celebrated Bolívar’s new nations. ‘Spanish America is free,’ he said, recognizing Bolívar’s Gran Colombia. He added melodramatically, ‘I called the New World into existence to redress the balance of the Old.’

Bolívar had won the war, but he struggled to control the peace.

ARE YOU STABBING ME, KING OF THE WORLD? BOLíVAR AND SHAKA

In 1828, Bolívar, inspired by both America and Britain to devise a way out of ‘anarchy’, assembled a congress at Ocaña to agree a constitution for Gran Colombia, but when the meeting broke up he imposed his own Organic Decree declaring himself president for life with the right to name his successor. Cadaverous and sick, Bolívar struggled to control his colossal state. His paramour Manuela refused to return to her English husband and rejoined Bolívar, scandalizing society with her power (nicknamed La Presidenta), dancing and frizelations while he dreamed of more conquests. Seizing power in Bogotá, he was declared president-Liberator. ‘The republic will be lost,’ he declared, ‘unless it gives me the fullest authority.’ Yet, to his horror, he was now hated as a tyrant.

As Bolívar’s enemies in south America planned his murder, in south Africa intimate killers stalked Shaka.

On 22 September 1828, Shaka was sitting on the mats outside his house at KwaDukuza admiring his cattle herd and receiving delegations, served by his isigodlo women, when suddenly his half-brothers Dingane and Mhlangana appeared, spears hidden under their cloaks. Shaka had established his kingdom using new military tactics and unpredictable terror, but his king-making aunt Mnkabayi, shocked by his Neronian matricide, now regarded him a ‘madman’. He had to be culled.

Shaka’s bodyguard Mbopha diverted the king’s attention by dispersing the gathered crowd. The king watched with amusement as Mbopha returned to take up his position behind him. But then, as the brothers approached, Mbopha speared Shaka in the back; Prince Mhlangana joined in, but Dingane, careful not to be a king slayer, held back. ‘What’s the matter with my father’s children?’ cried Shaka. ‘Are you stabbing me, king of the world? You’ll come to an end through killing one another.’ Mhlangana jumped over the body to claim the throne. The crowd watched in amazement. The assassins gathered to hear the sacred ballad and sacrifice a black ox to honour the deeds of ancestors and give thanksgiving to their father Senzangakona – and to purify the killers against wizardry.

Shaka was buried sitting up with a slice of buttock in his mouth to suppress the anger of his spirit; ten courtiers and women were sacrificed with him. The assassins banned mourning for the ‘madman’, then while Mbopha ran the kingdom, the Zulu family met to choose the new nkosi. Dingane was popular with the army, but Mhlangana had killed Shaka and jumped over his body. Dressed as a man, clad in robes of blue monkey tails and a feathered headdress, and brandishing a bundle of spears and a war shield, the Great She-Elephant Mnkabayi, who had made Shaka king and then agreed to his murder, denounced Shaka who had become chief only ‘through demented strength’. She decided that ‘the one with the bloody assegai’ – Mhlangana – ‘shall not rule’ and nominated Dingane, who called himself ‘the Mediator’. The She-Elephant ordered Mhlangana’s killing. Dingane invited Mhlangana to swim with him in the river, where the Great She-Elephant’s posse ambushed him.

Strapping and handsome with a small beard, agile in dance and war, Dingane, forty years old, executed Mbopha, eighty commanders and all his brothers except one and then crushed Tsonga opposition in southern Mozambique, as well as the Ndebele and Swazis. As for the Europeans at Lourenço Marques and Fort Natal, renamed Durban after the British governor of the Cape, Sir Benjamin D’Urban, he sent impis (Zulu regiments) to punish them, while persuading white hunters to train some of his men with rifles.

Shaka was dead, but in Bogotá, three days later, the assassins coming for Bolívar encountered a force of nature: Manuela.

In the early hours of 25 September 1828, a hit squad burst into the palace. Manuela, awakened, defended the door and, when Bolívar prepared to fight, ordered him to escape. Bolívar jumped out of the window; Manuela held the assassins at bay. Frustrated, they beat her as El Libertador hid under a bridge. Bolívar thanked Manuela, ‘Liberatrix of the Liberator’, but the humiliation had shattered the Genius of the Storm whose state now fell apart as Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela and Colombia grasped independence. Like Gran Colombia, Bolívar was dying.

In January 1830, Bolivar, still only forty-seven, faced reality: ‘Colombians! Today I cease to govern you … Never, never, I swear, have my thoughts been tainted by lust for kingship.’ Cadaverously consumptive, he retired to his house, La Quinta, near Cartagena, spluttering, ‘How will I get out of this labyrinth?’

There was no way out.

REVOLUTION: PEDRO AND DOMITILA

Bolívar died with a curse: ‘America’s ungovernable; he who serves a revolution ploughs the sea. The country will pass into the hands of an indistinguishable string of tyrants of every colour.’

Just as Bolívar was losing control of Colombia, Metternich was losing control of France, the sparkwheel of revolution. ‘When Paris coughs,’ said Metternich, ‘Europe catches cold.’

On 30 July 1830, revolution returned to the streets of Paris. The last of Louis XVI’s brothers, Charles X, aided by his minister the duc de Polignac, son of Marie Antoinette’s best friend, attacked the liberals in the Assembly, opposed by Lafayette – now seventy and back in France after being voted a fortune of $200,000 by the US Congress. From the start of his reign, Charles had been determined to promote absolutism at home and empire abroad. On 17 April 1825, he dispatched fourteen battleships to force Haiti to pay an indemnity to compensate France for the loss of its slaves and the 1804 massacre – in return for recognition. President Boyer was blackmailed into paying 150 million francs but was forced to take out a loan with a French bank to pay it. The money was sent to France in cash. The double debt impoverished Haiti.^*

As opposition seethed, Charles sought a Napoleonic distraction in an African conquest: it started as a farce but would in the twentieth century almost destroy France itself. When a ruler of Algiers touched a French envoy with his fly-whisk, Charles used this opéra bouffe moment as his pretext to invade the Barbary State, the start of what became the largest empire in Africa. On 5 July 1830, French troops seized Algiers. On the 9th, at Palais Saint-Cloud, Charles announced that he would now rule by ordinance and, as trouble began in Paris, on the 25th he cancelled the free press, dissolved the Assembly and cut the franchise. Two days later, the newspapers defied the king, launching the first media revolution. Crowds built barricades in the streets of Paris, shouting ‘À la guillotine!’ Fighting spread; on the 29th the mob stormed the Tuileries. As Lafayette rushed to the city and assumed the leadership of the National Guard, Charles abdicated. The Assembly invited Lafayette to rule; instead he proposed the king’s liberal cousin, Louis Philippe, as king of the French.

Louis Philippe’s father Philippe Égalité had been guillotined; he himself had fought the Austrians and had then defected from the revolution, travelling through Europe and America, staying with George Washington, teaching geography at a German school and maths at an English one, before returning to France with his Bourbon cousins.^* The duc d’Orléans was bluff, unpretentious and unregal, mocked by Talleyrand who quipped, ‘It’s not enough to be someone – you have to be something.’ But the king had lived an amazing life and even Talleyrand’s mistress-niece, Dorothea de Dino, said, ‘There’s no more interesting conversation than the king.’ But he played the citizen king, eschewing a court, while his friend James de Rothschild funded the regime and supported him in discouraging wars. Rothschild also backed the first railways, launching his Chemins de Fer du Nord by taking 1,700 Parisians to lunch in Lille and dinner in Brussels.

James held court in Talleyrand’s old mansion in Paris, where his dinners were cooked by Carême, a chef de bouche, philosopher of haute cuisine who had served Talleyrand, Alexander I and George IV. The banker was able to celebrate wins by his racehorses with his own Lafitte wines. Witty, caustic and vigilant, he was happily married to Betty, his beautiful Viennese niece, who had her five children taught piano by Chopin and held an almost royal salon, herself friends with Queen Marie Amélie. When his brother Nathan died in 1836, James became the leader of the family. He still spoke French with a heavy German accent and when his London niece married out of the faith, he insisted she be ostracized. Yet he personified a new interconnected capitalist world. At his salon he entertained not only princes but also Honoré de Balzac, the rambunctious novelist who observed characters, high and low, surviving in the new realm of industry and money. Balzac’s father had made it from peasant boy to royal secretary, then became a revolutionary organizer and idiosyncratic essayist, only at fifty-three marrying a beautiful, well-off shopkeeper’s daughter who became Balzac’s mother.

After an internship in a law firm,^* Balzac embarked on a quixotic pursuit of fortune in multiple fields, from publishing to Sardinian slagheaps and Ukrainian forestry, unable to resist a ‘bonne speculation’.

His first bestseller, Eugénie Grandet, portrayed a daughter overshadowed by the avarice of her rich farmer father; then in Père Goriot he introduced Rastignac, a young provincial making it in a turbulent Paris: ‘the streets of Paris possess human qualities’. Paris was always a character – ‘the city of a hundred thousand novels, the head of the world’.

Balzac’s novels, ‘faits pour tout le monde’, written for everyone and about everyone, made him, like Dumas, vast sums. He lived as he thought a Parisian writer should live, enjoying love affairs with duchesses and courtesans, writing all night, overweight, breathless, gradually poisoning himself on overdoses of coffee (a warning to all writers). But he was also a romantic, falling in love with a Polish countess whom he knew only through letters signed L’Étrangère.

Balzac accepted loans from James de Rothschild, but he perhaps resented the banker’s power, repaying his help with his character baron de Nucingen who bore resemblances to James. ‘The secret of all great fortunes, when there is no obvious explanation for them,’ wrote Balzac in his Le Père Goriot, defining a rule of modern capitalism, ‘is always some forgotten crime … forgotten because it’s been properly handled.’ Balzac was fascinated by all of society, analysed in his realistic novels, which he called ‘Études des Moeurs’, ‘that no longer believes in anything but money’. But it was through family that this indefatigable dynamo followed the threads.

After Paris, revolution spread to Habsburg Italy, Romanov Poland, the Netherlands and, in April 1831, Braganza Brazil. In 1824 Emperor Pedro had been granted a prerogrative – the Moderating Power – to oversee an assembly elected by a broad suffrage of white males in a hybrid constitution. Soon afterwards, in December 1825, his ill-treated Habsburg empress Leopoldina gave birth to a son, Pedro, duke of Braganza, but Pedro also flaunted his devotion to Domitila, now raised to marquess of Santos, who had herself just given birth to a daughter, Isabel, recognized by the emperor as duchess of Goiás.

Wildly in love with Domitila, he imposed his paramour on his depressed wife who, now hating ‘dreadful America’, wrote to her sister Marie Louise about the ‘barbarous’ Pedro: ‘He’s just given me proof of his negligence to me, mistreating me in the presence of the person who is the cause of all my afflictions.’ She was pregnant again. In December 1826, while her husband was away fighting a southern rebellion, Leopoldina miscarried; weakened by emetics and laxatives, she died. Pedro was horrified by his own behaviour, haunted by her ghost. He even jumped out of the bed he shared with Domitila: ‘Get off of me! I know I live an unworthy life. The thought of the empress doesn’t leave me.’ He sobbed over his son Pedro: ‘Poor boy, you are the most unhappy prince in the world.’ He decided to remarry.

It was not easy – in Brazil and Europe, his cruelty and promiscuity were notorious. He compromised, choosing Princess Amélie, the seventeen-year-old daughter of Josephine’s son Prince Eugène. So his first wife was Habsburg, his second Bonapartist. He became a loyal husband. Meanwhile, he struggled to establish Brazil. First he defeated the northern Confederation of the Equator before leading a war in the south: in 1825, the remote Brazilian province of Banda Oriental (East Bank) rebelled, encouraged by the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata. Pedro fought the Argentines on land and sea in small skirmishes (both the Argentine and Brazilian fleets on the River Plate were commanded by British mercenaries). At the same time, his father João of Portugal died, making him king there too. But he abdicated that throne in favour of his little daughter Maria II, who, with the negligence of dynasties, was dispatched to Portugal. But the Liberator’s war failed; he lost part of the province, which became Uruguay.

Hated for his marital cruelty, challenged by the liberal Assembly, facing rebellion from cariocas shouting ‘Death to the Emperor!’, Pedro abdicated and left for Europe, characteristically treating Brazil like a girlfriend. ‘Everything is over,’ he said, ‘between me and Brazil – for ever.’

His five-year-old son, now Emperor Pedro II, was raised in the seclusion of a country estate while Brazil was ruled by regents. Although the first constitution had promised a ‘gradual emancipation of African slaves’, the next one in 1824 ignored slavery, which was booming: 40,000 African slaves arrived annually in the first half of the 1820s, and 60,000 a year after 1826. British abolition of slave trading and its West Africa Squadron had reduced the Atlantic trade. Yet between 1807 and 1865, 3.5 million enslaved Africans were bought and transported across the ocean.

THE GLADSTONES – QUAMINA AND SIR JOHN: SLAVE REBELS AND SLAVE MASTERS

As Britain fought Napoleon and debated political reform, even Wilberforce said little about slavery, though 700,000 people remained enslaved on British plantations. Jamaican slavery was consolidated by the acquisition of Dutch Guiana on the mainland, where plantations in Demerara used slaves to make the world’s best brown sugar. Sir John Gladstone, devout Presbyterian son of a Scottish trader, who had moved to Liverpool and made a fortune in commodities, corn, sugar and cotton, trading with India, US and Brazil, already owned plantations in Jamaica but had bought a new one in Demerara that helped make him the biggest British slave owner and chairman of the West India Association, the Interest. Yet it was just at this moment that the slaves themselves placed their suffering back at the centre of politics.

In August 1823, Quamina and Jack Gladstone, an enslaved father and son, led a revolt starting on the Success plantation, owned by Gladstone. They were not, however, related to the nabob of Liverpool, whose three sons, including William, the future prime minister, were already at Eton. Quamina, in his late forties, who had been trafficked from the Gold Coast, was Gladstone’s head carpenter; his son Jack, a cooper, was handsome, ‘well-made’ and six foot two. Forced to work thirteen-hour shifts, Quamina had been prevented from nursing his dying wife Peggy, and returned to find her dead. Encouraged by an English pastor, John Smith, whose church Quamina attended, Jack organized a revolt which was joined by 13,000 slaves. They almost seized the colony.

The British rushed their West India Regiment, made up of freed Caribbean slaves, to crush the rebels. Hundreds were killed; nineteen were sentenced to death, their heads displayed on spikes, a warning to the African-born slaves who believed only complete bodies would return to their homes after death. Quamina was cornered, shot and strung up on a gibbet, where a ‘colony of wasps built a nest in the cavity of the stomach and were flying in and out of the jaws that hung frightfully open’. After a letter from Gladstone in England requesting mercy, Jack was exiled to St Lucia, but the death in prison of the Reverend John Smith ignited the abolitionist cause as much as killing the enslaved. As abolition gathered momentum, so did the resistance of the Interest.

The duke of Wellington, now prime minister,^* was determined to resist abolition, parliamentary reform and the lifting of restrictions on Catholics and Jews. Yet his lieutenant Robert Peel, the textiles heir, persuaded him to end Catholic restrictions.^* The duke claimed Parliament had no right to free slaves. ‘We must not plunder the proprietors in the West Indies,’ he said, ‘to acquire popularity in England,’ while the removing of Jewish restrictions was out of the question.

British manufacturing was booming, aided by the first railways, which used steam power to transport passengers and goods at perilous new speeds: on 15 September 1830, Wellington opened the Manchester–Liverpool line. Former cabinet minister William Huskisson was chatting to the duke in his official locomotive, when another, The Rocket, careened towards him. Huskisson tried to climb into the ducal train, but fell under Rocket’s wheels, his leg smashed as the duke watched. ‘I’ve met my death,’ said Huskisson. ‘God forgive me!’ The accident did not act as a deterrent, and railways quickly united Britain: train journeys rose from 5.5 million in 1838 to 111 million twenty years later. In Manchester, Wellington was booed by millworkers, but he still refused parliamentary reform – a policy which destroyed his ministry just as the fat old king, George IV, died. His only child, the adored Charlotte, had died in childbirth at twenty-one in 1817. So his heir was his brother, the Duke of Clarence, a bluff former sailor, with ten illegitimate children by his actress paramour, who was doubtful about reform and abolition. He became William IV aged sixty-four and was forced to offer the premiership to Charles, Earl Grey, a veteran advocate of reform and abolition. Out of power since 1807, this septuagenarian Regency roué and landed magnate boasted that ‘The acreage of his cabinet surpassed any previous record.’ Yet Grey would revolutionize the British world in two acts.

LORD CUPID AND THE LADY PATRONESSES

Grey’s partner was his irrepressible foreign secretary, the Anglo-Irish landowner Harry Temple, Viscount Palmerston, now forty-six. Originally notable for his tireless sexual adventures, Palmerston, who dominated governments from 1830 to 1865, was more than anyone else the architect of British world power in a new age of empire.

As a Harrow schoolboy, he had been known as a philistine boxer; as a young man, he was nicknamed Lord Cupid, an unreconstructed Regency buck who had first attracted attention as the lover of three of the five lady patronesses of the elite Almack’s club, starting with the Russian ambassador’s wife, Dorothea Lieven, who had also been Metternich’s paramour. Now, unrestrained by being foreign secretary, he kept a diary of his almost daily sexual encounters, sometimes in the morning, sometimes in the evening and often in the middle of the day, with a diverse cast of courtesans, prostitutes and countesses, scarcely concealed, in a very English code, as reports of the weather. ‘A fine night in the garden’ was a typical entry.

Lord Cupid had been in Tory governments since 1809 as secretary at war, but in 1828 he switched to the Whigs as a protégé of Canning, a supporter of cautious reform and the abolition of slavery. From now on, serving almost permanently as foreign secretary, he backed liberal measures at home while implacably promoting British power abroad. ‘We have no eternal allies, no perpetual enemies,’ he declared. ‘Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.’ He insisted, ‘Those who desire to see the principles of liberty thrive and extend through the world should cherish, with an almost religious veneration, the prosperity and greatness of England.’ When a Frenchman, thinking to be highly complimentary, said to Palmerston, ‘If I weren’t a Frenchman, I’d wish to be an Englishman,’ he replied, ‘If I weren’t an Englishman, I should wish to be an Englishman.’ His endurance in detailed negotiations earned him another nickname: Protocols Palmerston. A mediocre speaker, the exuberant, shrewd and bewhiskered ruffian became a public icon, portrayed in the press as Pam the prize fighter. It was Lord Pumicestone who now forged Britain’s idiosyncratic combination of liberal mission and gun-toting imperialism – a policy which resembled that of the US in the second half of the twentieth century. It was built in his own image. He first coped with the aftermath of the 1830 revolutions in which the former Austrian Netherlands rebelled against the Dutch king. Palmerston created a new kingdom, Belgium, that he hoped would restrain France and guard the balance of power.

He offered its throne to a favourite prince, Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, widower of the British heiress Charlotte. Leopold became the first king of Belgium, where his family still reign.

Metternich was shaken by 1830 – ‘My entire life is destroyed’ – and he hated Palmerston: ‘Palmerston is wrong about everything.’ Palmerston enjoyed baiting the old chancellor. ‘I’d like to see Metternich’s face,’ he said. But the 1830 revolutions proved less disastrous than first feared: the tsar crushed the Poles, Metternich held Italy; Louis Philippe and Leopold stabilized France and Belgium, where both proved vigorous patrons of industry, and both were intimate allies of the Rothschilds. Louis Philippe appeared the very model of a modern monarch; the Bonapartes were clearly finished.^*

As Palmerston projected his new world vision, at home he backed reform and abolition, which were now becoming inevitable.

RATHER DIE THAN LIVE AS A SLAVE: DADDY SHARPE AND ABOLITION

In December 1831, 60,000 Jamaican slaves rebelled, led by a captivating Baptist millenarian preacher, Samuel ‘Daddy’ Sharpe, ‘the most intelligent, remarkable slave, his fine sinewy frame handsomely moulded’, recalled a missionary, with ‘an eye whose brilliancy was most dazzling’. Only fourteen whites were killed but, aided as usual by the Maroons, whom planters paid by the numbers of black ears delivered, the Christmas Rebellion was crushed. Six hundred slaves died in battle or were murdered by planters, 340 sentenced to death, some just for stealing a pig or a cow. ‘I’d rather die upon yonder gallows,’ declared Sharpe, ‘than live as a slave.’

As Grey appointed a committee of inquiry filled with slave owners, rioters demanded electoral reform and attacked Wellington’s mansion. On 7 June 1832, Grey and Palmerston passed the Reform Act, a partial measure that raised the electorate by 250,000 voters to around 650,000 – almost the same number as the Caribbean slaves whose liberation became the issue in the general election at the end of that year. Young William Gladstone denounced abolition, arguing that slavery was ‘not necessarily an evil’, and claimed that the conditions of slaves were no worse than those of child labourers in England, while liberation would ‘exchange the evils now affecting the negro for others which are weightier’. The king, who had visited slave plantations as a sailor, also insisted that the ‘state of the negroes’ was ‘humble happiness’.

Yet, horrified by the slave rebellions, the reformed Parliament finally had a majority for abolition. Grey’s colonial secretary, Edward Stanley, Lancashire grandee, future earl of Derby, later thrice prime minister, promised abolition ‘without palliative or compromise’. But if it was to pass, it required both palliative and compromise – ‘to be fair to the slave’, said Palmerston, ‘as to the planter’. The votes of the Interest blocked abolition unless the government paid compensation, buying the slaves from their owners in order to liberate them.

The Slavery Abolition Act had its third reading in the House of Commons in August 1833, just after William Wilberforce died, and came into force a year later. But it was so flawed that some abolitionists contemplated voting against.

The compromise egregiously enriched slave owners for owning humans, yet without the compensation it would not have passed. Slaves became indentured ‘apprentices’ for six years before full liberation. The slave owners, who varied from titled grandees to persons of colour, a quarter of them women, were, for example, paid £20 a slave in Jamaica, £15 in Guiana, a total of £15 million.^* Sir John Gladstone received the biggest payment, £106,769 for his 2,508 slaves, and his son William, the future prime minister, acknowledged abolition: ‘God prosper it.’^*

Yet not everyone was delighted by abolition. In Africa many rulers obstinately resisted the end of this profitable trade and, strangely, abolition coincided with an intensification of conflict and of slavery itself across the continent.

THE FEMALE FIGHTERS OF DAHOMEY, THE VICEROY OF OUIDAH, THE CALIPH OF SOKOTO AND COMMANDANT PRETORIUS

Four years after abolition but out of British reach, the caliph of Sokoto, Muhammad Bello, died, leaving a new empire that was now the second largest slave state in world history with around 2.5 million slaves – compared to 3.5 million in the largest, the USA. Bello’s father, Usman dan Fodio, a tall, charismatic Hausa born in Gobir (Nigeria), a Muslim city, had in 1774 at the age of twenty launched a jihad, inspired by mystical trances and visions, going on to conquer the largest empire in sub-Saharan Africa and in 1803 declaring himself the caliph. On his death in 1817, his son Bello continued the holy war, expanding from northern Nigeria to Burkina Faso, Cameroon and Niger.

Wars between African polities continued as they fought and expanded, no different from Eurasian states; wars captured slaves, who were less easy to export, creating a surplus. ‘After abolition,’ writes John Reader, ‘the use of slaves in Africa became more common than ever before and enslavement actually increased.’

Further south, King Ghezo of Dahomey, assisted by the notorious ‘viceroy of Ouidah’ and his female army, resisted abolition. One visitor to Ghezo’s palace in the capital Abomey passed ‘three human heads … the blood still oozing’ on each side of the doorway. ‘The slave trade has been the ruling principle of my people,’ Ghezo told British envoys. ‘It’s the source of their glory and wealth. Their songs celebrate their victories and the mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery.’

Ghezo intensified his slave trading, selling 10,000 slaves annually. He sent expeditions to seize slaves from neighbouring peoples, and turned his female bodyguard into the crack Ahosi, or Mino (King’s Wives, or Mothers, in Fon), vanguard of 3,000–6,000 girl soldiers who fascinated European visitors raised on tales of Herodotos’ Amazons. Joining as early as eight and banned from sex or marriage (except with the king), the women were trained to endure pain by barefoot tramping over thorns. They wore striped armless tunics and a crocodile-emblazoned cap, and carried daggers, short swords, maces and rifles. They would chant:

As blacksmiths forge iron and change its nature,

So we change ours!

We’re no longer women, we are men.

Some were recruited from palace women, some forcibly enrolled by their own families, many were widows of killed or enslaved captives. Ghezo used them not only as shock troops and slave raiders but also as his executioners; visitors chronicled hundreds of scalps collected by the warriors. Their commander, Seh-Dong-Hong-Beh, was drawn by a visiting British envoy, holding a rifle in one hand and a bleeding severed head in the other.

In 1818, this young Dahomean prince had seized the throne from his brother, King Adandozan, with the help of an Afro-Brazilian slave trader, Francisco de Sousa, scion of the first Portuguese governor of Brazil. Adandozan increased his slaving expeditions while using slaves to work his plantations of palm olive that now became profitable in Nigeria. He even sold possible dissidents within the royal family as slaves. The grizzled, gruesome de Sousa, who combined Catholic and voodoo faith, was originally so poor that he stole cowrie shells from voodoo temples, but ultimately he thrived as a slave trader, living in sultanic splendour in a family compound, Singbomey in Ouidah, amid a harem of African women with whom he fathered 201 children. When he went to reclaim a debt from Adandozan in Abomey, the king imprisoned him. But he was visited in jail by Prince Gakpe (the future Ghezo), whose mother Sousa had rescued from Brazilian slavery, and they made a blood pact to destroy the king. Aided in his escape by the Afro-Dutch widow of King Agonglo, he delivered guns to the prince, who seized power, taking the name Ghezo, and promoted Sousa to chacha, an invented title derived from his habit of saying ‘Já, já!’ – Soon, soon! in Portuguese. Ghezo installed his mother, Agontime, as kpojito (queen mother) and, using rifles supplied by Sousa, broke the Oyo kingdom, thus expanding his power. Before long Britain blockaded his ports in a bid to restrict his slaving.

Ghezo and Bello were far from the only African potentates who resented abolition.^* Slavery was booming in east Africa too, and in southern Africa a white tribe was also outraged by the abolition of slavery.

In 1836, Dutch-speaking Afrikaners, who regarded the enslaving of Africans as a God-given right, started to migrate from the Cape, to escape British rule and conquer a new homeland. These 14,000 Voortrekkers, righteous, heavily armed and well organized, accompanied by a similar number of enslaved Africans who, after abolition, had been retitled ‘apprentices’ but were often trained to fight beside them, clashed with the African kings. The Afrikaners became another tribe in the chain-predation of the Mfecane for land and cattle – but with better weaponry. Some attacked King Mzilikazi of the Ndebele, driving him north into Zimbabwe; others led by Piet Retief reached the Zulu court of King Dingane. Shouting ‘Kill the Wizards!’, Dingane had them cudgelled to death before attacking their encampments, killing 40 Voortrekkers, 250 black auxiliaries and 185 children, while another regiment under Prince Mpande eliminated an entire British unit from Natal, killing the sixteen whites and several thousand black auxiliaries and raiding Port Natal itself. But the Afrikaners rallied under the skilled fighter Andries Pretorius, elected chief commandant, who in December 1838, deploying 472 Boers and 120 African troops, defeated 12,000 Zulus, killing 1,000 of them with just three Boers wounded. Pretorius founded a republic around a new town of Pietermaritzburg in Zulu territory. Dingane, defeated by the Swazis and humiliated by the Boers, was planning to kill his remaining brother Mpande. Accompanied by his son Cetshwayo, Mpande escaped to recruit Pretorius’s help.

In 1840, Mpande and Pretorius attacked and defeated Dingane, who retreated to the mountains, only to be murdered by his own courtiers. Fat, indolent and good-natured but aware that ‘the Zulu people are ruled through killing’, Mpande had no choice but to divvy up the booty of cattle with Pretorius, to whom he ceded two-fifths of his kingdom. Britain, whose appetites and resources exceeded those of all local players, Dutch and Nguni, was on their tail, soon consuming the Afrikaner Republic of Natal.

As for Pretorius, invited north to aid the Sotho king Moshoeshoe, he founded a new South African (later Transvaal) Republic, while other Voortrekkers created the Orange Free State. When Pretorius died, his son Marthinus was elected president of Transvaal – its capital named Pretoria after his father – and later of the Free State too, all the while hunting elephants for ivory, rustling and wrangling cattle and seizing African slaves. Soon the discovery of diamonds and gold would spark another tournament of power.

Further north, in Egypt, slavery was still essential to the project of Mehmed Ali, who had hired French officers to train an army of enslaved Georgians and Sudanese, conscripted Egyptian fellahin and Turkish officers and rebuilt his fleet. Infuriated that the sultan had lost him his fleet at Navarino, he demanded Syria in return. When it was not forthcoming, he seized his chance to conquer an empire.

MEHMED ALI’S GAMBIT: NAPOLEON OF THE EAST

On 31 October 1831, Mehmed Ali’s son Ibrahim invaded Syria, seizing Jerusalem and Damascus. ‘If the sultan says I can keep Damascus,’ mused Mehmed Ali, backed by Louis Philippe, ‘I’ll stop there … and if not, who knows?’ Then, in May 1832, Ibrahim crossed the Taurus Mountains into the Turkish heartland. As Mehmed Ali considered placing Ibrahim on the throne of Constantinople, Sultan Mahmud granted Egypt to him and ceded Syria. As Ibrahim moved closer to the Great City, the sultan appealed to his ancestral enemy, Tsar Nicholas, who sent an army to defend Constantinople, and in July he accepted a Russian protectorate. Nicholas claimed he wished to preserve the Ottoman empire: ‘If it falls, I don’t desire its debris. I need nothing.’ No one believed him.

In May 1838, Mehmed Ali, who now ruled Sudan, Arabia, Syria, Israel and most of Anatolia, declared independence from Constantinople. Sultan Mahmud had recently eliminated the overmighty Janissaries – massacring 5,000 of them – and hired western officers to train his own modern army.^* But now, at Nezib, Ibrahim routed the new Ottoman army and advanced on the Great City. Encouraged by his evangelical son-in-law Lord Shaftesbury, and the campaigns of Montefiore, both believers in a Jewish Return to Zion, Palmerston dispatched a British consul to Jerusalem to protect Jews, long the target of persecution. He was determined to save the Ottoman, undermine the Romanov and stop Mehmed Ali. In July 1840, Palmerston threatened Louis Philippe, Mehmed Ali’s backer, with war and rescued the Ottomans, sending in the fleet to bombard Beirut and Acre: Mehmed Ali accepted hereditary rule in Egypt and Sudan in return for withdrawing from Syria, Türkiye, Crete and Arabia.

Further east, Lord Cupid faced a crisis of Britain’s own making in Afghanistan, where the grandsons of the great king, Durrani, ruined their empire by fighting each other, allowing another Pashtun clan, the Barakzais, led by Dost Mohammad, to seize Kabul. Durrani’s deposed grandson, Shah Shuja, went into Indian exile.

Palmerston and his Indian proconsuls monitored Russian advances in central Asia. The buffer states between the two empires – the khanates of Bukhara and Khiva, Persia, Afghanistan and the Sikh kingdom – became the arena for a clandestine tournament, the so-called Great Game, in which daring Britons and Russians, often in local disguise, tried to recruit the rulers. Russia backed a Persian attack on Herat while a Russian force tried to take the khanate of Khiva (Uzbekistan). Britain backed the Sikh maharaja Ranjit Singh, inveterate enemy of the Afghans.^* The Afghan amir Dost Mohammad resisted British demands to hand over control of foreign policy. Exaggerating his defiance, manipulated by the Sikh maharaja, the Indian governor-general Lord Auckland lied to London, demanding an invasion to install Shah Shuja when he should simply have negotiated a security arrangement. Palmerston reluctantly approved.

In February 1839, the Army of the Indus – 55,000 strong, with British officers and Indian sepoys, aided by Sikh troops – marched on Kabul, where, in August, Shah Shuja Durrani was acclaimed shah. Withdrawing most of the British forces, Auckland left 8,000 to back Durrani, their number reduced further when the new British prime minister, Robert Peel, cut costs. In Kabul, the sexual liaisons of Afghan women and British troops outraged the Afghans as much as the cruelties of Shah Shuja, regarded as a puppet of the British, and of the Sikhs, hated since Durrani’s Punjab wars. Tensions were further aggravated when a British soldier raped an Afghan girl. Around Kandahar, the Ghilzai launched a jihad against the British.

On 2 November 1841, the amir’s son Akbar Khan led insurgents into Kabul, where they attacked and killed the British within the town, then besieged the military cantonment. When Akbar tricked the British into negotiations, he personally gutted their envoy. After a defeat at Bibi Mahru, 690 Britons, 3,800 Indians and 12,000 women and children were forced into a retreat from Kabul.

As they passed through narrow defiles, Akbar, deploying masterful Afghan snipers, orchestrated the slaughter of the entire column in eight days. A single survivor, Dr Brydon, staggered into Jalalabad. Shah Shuja turned against the British but was assassinated.

In 1842, two British armies invaded Afghanistan, leaving a trail of destruction and slaughter, and retook Kabul, where they dynamited the bazaar and pillaged the city before departing. Despite the unprecedented loss of 4,500 soldiers, British power had been reasserted, and was confirmed by the fate of the Sikh empire: its maharaja had died during the invasion. In 1849, his son Maharaja Duleep Singh signed the Punjab over to the British. In 1855, the Afghan amir Dost Mohammad agreed to be ‘friends’ with Britain.

The retreat was a disaster, but a small one for a global empire. The lesson was not that Afghanistan was ‘the graveyard of empires’ – an erroneous cliché – but simply that invaders should get in and get out fast, which is what happened in 1842. Afghanistan remained a client state – with a blood-spattered interlude in 1878 – until 1919. Ironically, imperial Britain handled Afghanistan much more wisely than democratic America and Britain in the twenty-first century.

Back in the Mediterranean, Palmerston had successfully saved the Ottoman sultanate from Mehmed Ali and from the Russians. As he sank into senility, fantasizing about an invasion of China, Mehmed Ali, the greatest leader of Egypt in modern times, left an independent state, with a cotton industry and a modern army, that would be ruled by his family into the 1950s.

To the west, another cotton-producing, slave-trading empire under a successful warlord was planning its own expansion.

Into Texas.

AMERICAN WARLORDS: JACKSON’S BULLETS AND SANTA ANNA’S LEG

On 30 January 1835 in Congress, a mad assassin fired two pistols at President Jackson, then aged sixty-seven, and both misfired. Old Ferocious had lost none of his ferocity: he felled the assassin with his cane and would have beaten him to death had he not been pulled off by a fellow frontiersman, Davy Crockett.

The presence of the beaver-hatted Crockett was no coincidence. The member of the House of Representatives was planning his own personal expeditions to seize Texas.

The grizzled president founded his entire career on expansion into British, Spanish and Native American territory. Craggy, six foot one with blue eyes and wild red hair, this tough son of Ulster raised in the Carolinas was a harsh frontiersman and saloon brawler who had two bullets in his body from duels. His men called him Old Hickory, Native Americans dubbed him Sharp Knife and Old Ferocious – and the story of his life was the story of the voracious march of American power. ‘I was born for the storm,’ he said, ‘and a calm does not suit me.’

As a teenager, he fought in the War of Independence; as a young man, he won fortune enough to buy his Hermitage, Tennessee, cotton estate and 150 slaves, yet also adopted a Native American orphan. He defended with his pistols the virtue of his wife Rachel against accusations of bigamy: he killed a man who insulted her. On the frontiers he commanded militias of settlers and their Native American auxiliaries, keen to ‘conquer not only the Floridas but all Spanish North America’. In 1812, when Britain’s harassment of American ships and encouragement of Shawnee resistance led to war, Colonel Jackson struck at Muscogee (Creek) Native Americans who had attacked American colonists, and on 8 January 1815 General Jackson became a national hero by saving New Orleans and routing a British army. During the war, enslaved African-Americans fled to the Seminole Indians and formed their own free community at Fort Negro in Florida. In 1816, Jackson, assisted by Creek auxiliaries, raided Florida, destroyed Fort Negro and defeated the British-backed Seminole.^* In 1818, ignoring President Monroe, he finally seized Florida, executing two captured British agents. Spain, coping with Bolívar in south America, sold Florida to the US; Jackson later became governor of the new state. He despised the hifalutin presidents Monroe and Adams, Virginian aristocrats and Massachusetts lawyers, laughing that ‘It’s a damn poor mind that can think of only one way to spell a word.’

In 1822, Jackson, wounded and exhausted, collapsed after his victories, coughing blood, but he recuperated then built his Democratic Party, and ran for president against John Quincy Adams. He lost the first campaign but won the second in 1828, which was viciously fought: Jackson was accused of being the cannibal son of a prostitute and a ‘mulatto’, married to a bigamist. Warning that ‘the most important powers of government have been given or bartered away’ and that he would reclaim them for the people, Jackson achieved 56 per cent of the popular vote, growling, ‘Desperate courage makes one a majority.’ But Rachel, anguished by the abuse, died of a heart attack just afterwards. Jackson had to be prised off the body, and at her funeral at Hermitage he warned, ‘God Almighty forgive her murderers, as I know she forgave them. I never can.’

Jackson’s politics like his life was visceral: he regularly swore to kill his rivals; he loathed bankers and told a delegation, ‘You’re a den of vipers and thieves, and by the eternal God, I will rout you out.’ Taking the oath on 4 March 1829, Jackson invited the public to his inaugural party in the White House and supposedly escaped the ensuing carnival through the window. In office he purged the bureaucracy of ‘unfaithful or incompetent hands’, launching the system of presidents appointing their own civil services. Jackson’s government was no cleaner than his predecessors’: he preferred to rule through his cronies, nicknamed the Kitchen Cabinet, instead of his ministers, the Parlour Cabinet, who infuriated him by protesting against the morality of his war minister’s wife.

Jackson aggressively pushed forward the American frontier, passing his Indian Removal Act that forced Native Americans on to reservations in Oklahoma – thousands of Cherokee died on the way in their ‘Trail of Tears’. In the west, fur traders, some working for Astor, pioneered the Santa Fe and Oregon trails, guided and protected by Mountain Men: James Kirker, an Irish immigrant, came to personify the feral darkness of frontier life. A younger colleague, Kit Carson, later became its glamorous face, hero of ‘dime novels’ and newspaper articles. Both were illiterates who started as fur traders, dabbling in silver and copper mining. They lived like natives, often married native wives – and killed natives. Kirker, the older of the two, had commanded an American privateer against the British in 1812, then, hunting furs, lived beside the Apache, even joining their raids. Carson, joining a western expedition, killed his first Native Americans at nineteen. They had stolen his horses. ‘During our pursuit for the lost animals, we suffered considerably,’ he wrote, ‘but the success of having recovered our horses and sending many a redskin to his long home, our sufferings were soon forgotten.’ The Americans scalped their victims just as the natives would scalp them. Yet Carson married two Native American women, Singing Grass and Making Out Road.

Jackson’s Indian policy was linked to his expansionist plans for Spanish America. He hoped to buy Texas from a new country that had emerged from the Spanish provinces of New Spain: Mexico. His opponent was Antonio López de Santa Anna, whose career, based on a famous victory against a European imperial power, resembled his own. Six times president, Santa Anna dominated Mexico for fifty years.^*

As Santa Anna built up his estates in Veracruz and rose to general, he made his name in 1829 defeating a final Spanish attempt to retake New Spain, after which he declared himself Napoleon of the West. In 1833 he was elected president, but he was happiest either holding court at his hacienda, seducing women (he married two heiresses, the second being sixteen when she married the forty-something general; he recognized four illegitimate children) or leading an army. But Mexico was vast, stretching from California to Texas and encompassing most of central America. Comanche and Apache ranged across its northern provinces, fighting for its prizes, cattle and human. A Comanche paraibo Iron Jacket raided into Texas: in 1820, he had a son Peta Nocona, who would play a special role in American history. Both the Mexicans and American settlers struggled to cope with the free-ranging Comanche who had mastered horse and rifle warfare across their realm of Comancheria.

Santa Anna disdained his Amerindian and mixed-race citizens. ‘A hundred years to come,’ he told an American, ‘my people won’t be fit for liberty. They don’t know what it is; a despotism is a proper government for them, but there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be a wise and virtuous one.’ He believed he was the man to provide it. The president enforced a new centralized government, but he faced Jackson, who hoped to do in Texas what he had done in Florida. The American capture of Texas was once presented as a noble enterprise against primitive Mexicans. In fact, in 1829, Mexico had abolished slavery; the Americans wished to restore it.

In 1825, Stephen Austin, whose father had dreamed of colonizing the territory, settled 1,200 families in Texas under a contract with the Mexican government. They were slave owners. ‘The idea of seeing such a country as this overrun by a slave population almost makes me weep,’ said Austin. ‘It is in vain to tell a North American that the white population will be destroyed some fifty or eighty years hence by the negroes, and that his daughters will be violated and butchered by them.’ Hence ‘Texas must be a slave country.’

Austin, joined by Davy Crockett, demanded autonomy for his colony, then in October 1835 declared independence. Santa Anna arrested him and marched into Texas but was held up by Crockett and other frontiersmen at the old mission at Alamo. During the thirteen-day siege, Santa Anna killed 188 frontiersmen, then slaughtered Crockett and 342 prisoners. His wars were usually combined with sex: during the Alamo, Santa Anna seduced a beautiful girl who refused to sleep with him unless they married. The caudillo dressed a colonel as a priest and held a fake wedding ceremony to trick her.

Yet the delay at the Alamo enabled a remarkable late-coming Texan settler to emerge as leader. Sam Houston, who had spent years living with the Cherokee people and had fought with Jackson against the Creek, had qualified as a lawyer and been elected governor of Tennessee before arriving in Texas, where he swiftly rivalled Austin as leader. At San Jacinto, Houston defeated and captured Santa Anna (though he himself was wounded) and was elected president of the Republic of Texas. At the end of his presidency, Jackson offered Mexico $5 million for Texas and considered seizing it. President Houston knew the Cherokee and other tribes well and planned to negotiate a border between Texas and Comancheria, but he lost power to Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar,^* a Georgian cotton planter’s son, poet, lawyer and warrior. Lamar had led the cavalry charge at San Jacinto and now armed the republic’s own paramilitary killers, the Rangers, to destroy the Comanche and Cherokee, whom he called ‘red n——’ and ‘wild cannibals’, demanding their ‘total extinction’. The Rangers, aided by Indian auxiliaries, the cannibal Tonkawa and mixed-race black Indians, fought the Comanche and Apache, the two sides mirror-images of the other. These masters of murderous frontier war embarked on fifty years of ferocious conflict.

In May 1836, Iron Jacket and his teenaged son Peta Nocona joined 500 Comanche and allies on a raid into eastern Texas, where they attacked Fort Parker, the log-cabin stronghold of a seventy-seven-year-old frontiersman, John Parker, and his family. The Comanche killed, scalped and castrated the male Parkers and captured two women and three children, including Cynthia Ann Parker, aged eight, who was adopted by Comanche and renamed Foundling, learning the language and embracing their culture. A few years later, she was chosen by Peta Nocona as a wife. Comanche were polygamous, but Peta loved her, and they had three children, the first being a son, Quanah. Cynthia was not alone. By the 1840s, the Comanche owned 5,000 Mexican slaves.

In 1849, Kit Carson helped track an American woman, Mrs Ann White, captured by the Apache, who killed her at the last moment. ‘Mrs. White was a frail, delicate, very beautiful woman,’ wrote one of the soldiers, ‘but having undergone such usage as she suffered nothing but a wreck remained … covered with blows and scratches.’ If they survived the initiation, these prisoners could be freed to become Comanche themselves.

The Texans never gave up on trying to find each of the captives taken during the raids. Although hundreds were either ransomed or eventually rescued in Texas Ranger and Scout expeditions, many others remained in the hands of the Comanche; some wished to remain. The Rangers launched reprisal attacks against Comancheria. Comanche chiefs became willing to negotiate peace, restoring white slaves in return for recognition of Comancheria.

In March 1840, sixty-five chiefs, accompanied by women and two children, arrived at the Council House in San Antonio to negotiate, bringing with them one white captive, a girl. Suddenly the windows of the Council House opened and hidden Texan militiamen opened fire on the Comanche, who had left their guns and lances outside the town. Thirty-five Comanche (including three women and a child) were shot down, along with seven Texans. As vengeance, a war chief, Buffalo Hump, amassed a war band of around 500, including Iron Jacket, who in July raided towns on the coast, killing slaves, capturing 1,500 horses and bloodying Texas units – even the Rangers, who managed to kill twelve Comanche at Plum Creek. When Sam Houston was re-elected as Texan president, he negotiated a peace recognizing Comancheria, but the Senate refused to ratify it. Meanwhile the Comanche paraibos Buffalo Hump and Iron Jacket led 800 warriors to raid Mexico.

The Mexicans responded by hiring James Kirker, that agile, long-haired Mountain Man. The fur trade was dying, and in 1834 Astor sold out. ‘Beaver was getting scarce,’ said Kit Carson. ‘It became necessary to try our hand at something else.’ Carson became an army scout and guide for the thousands of migrants heading west. Hired by Mexico, Kirker became a professional killer, leading (with a Shawnee deputy named Spybuck) a crew of 200 psychopaths – whites, Indians, escaped black slaves. They were joined by John Horse, a legendary Black Seminole, son of an enslaved mother and Seminole father, who had fought the Americans, afterwards escaping both American and Seminole slavery, to reach Mexico where he became a frontier auxiliary and scalp hunter. These chilling predators, sporting necklaces of ears, were paid by ‘scalps with an ear on each end’ (100 pesos for an adult male, 50 for a woman, 25 for a child). Kirker himself killed over 500 Apache.^* The Comanche joined in killing their Apache rivals.

Released by the Americans, Santa Anna redeemed himself in blood when the French king Louis Philippe sent an army to Veracruz to avenge Mexican ill treatment of a French pâtissier – was there ever a more Gallic pretext for war? In 1839, Santa Anna defeated the French, though in the fray he lost a leg and a hand; ever the showman, he granted his leg a military funeral. His lost limbs restored his power but not for long. A rebellious mob overthrew his presidency and, exhuming his honoured leg, smashed it in the streets of Mexico City. The general retired to Cuba, but he was soon back.

In February 1845, the outgoing President John Tyler, Virginian slave holder, annexed Texas as many Americans embraced the idea that the continent was their providential empire, its conquest their ‘manifest destiny’. Over thirty years, 400,000 poor migrants trekked westwards in wagons along the dangerous Oregon trails. Mexico mobilized as the incoming president James Polk, who had campaigned for expansion, provoked war then ordered a full-scale invasion which blooded many of the generals of the future civil war; the Mountain Men Carson and Kirker served as scouts. In the army of General ‘Old Rough ’n’ Ready’ Zachary Taylor as he won the first US victories served a young officer, Ulysses Grant, the reticent, intense son of a loudmouth Ohio entrepreneur, a West Pointer married to Julia, daughter of a curmudgeonly southern slave owner. Grant disapproved of this ‘most unjust war’, as did an Illinois congressman, Abraham Lincoln, who attacked Polk’s quest for ‘military glory – that attractive rainbow, that rises in showers of blood’.

When Polk became jealous of Rough ’n’ Ready’s laurels, he appointed Winfield ‘Old Fuss ’n’ Feathers’ Scott to land at Veracruz. As Scott advanced on Mexico City, Grant, a cavalry virtuoso, served with his future opponent, Robert E. Lee. Mexico turned to their one-legged hero Santa Anna, whose fortified position halted Scott’s advance until Lee found a way to bypass it. Santa Anna escaped, ‘pursued so closely’, Grant told his wife Julia, ‘that his carriage, a splendid affair, was taken and in it his cork leg and $30,000 in gold’. On 8 September 1847, Scott fought through the streets into Mexico City, and afterwards promoted both Grant and Lee.^*

On 2 February 1848, in a treaty signed at Guadalupe Hidalgo, America won California and new territories larger than western Europe; Mexico lost 55 per cent of its land. The victory opened opportunities for American settlers, who rushed westwards to find land and gold, but this expansion now raised the question: would slavery expand with it? ‘The United States will conquer Mexico,’ wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘but it will be as the man who swallows the arsenic, which will bring him down in turn. Mexico will poison us.’ Grant saw the coming catastrophe as ‘largely the outgrowth of the Mexican war. Nations, like individuals,’ he wrote, ‘are punished for their transgressions.’ There were now over three million slaves in the cotton-growing southern states, while the industrial north attracted waves of immigrants from Ireland, Germany and later Italy who poured into its growing cities.

The settler nation now extended from ocean to ocean, even though the central section was, writes Pekka Hämäläinen, ‘a seemingly disordered, uncontainable world of grasslands, deserts, buffalos, and Indians’. Thousands rode in wagons, prey to the elements and Native Americans. In February 1847, a party of eighty-seven members of the Donner family tried a new route from Missouri but, getting lost in mountains and desert, were decimated by hunger and reduced to cannibalism. Only forty-eight survived. Two years later, the discovery of gold in California launched the first gold fever: the village of San Francisco grew from 1,000 souls to 30,000; altogether 300,000 settlers rushed to California. For almost a century, few settlers had arrived in America – in 1820, just 8,000 came – but now, thanks to steamships, crises in Europe, land rushes and gold rushes, immigration tripled: 1.6 million Irish, escaping a famine at home, immigrated,^* the start of a rush of settlers that transformed America, creating new cities and bringing more Europeans into contact with Native Americans, who still controlled much of the interior.

In California, militias of gold miners and other settlers attacked and slaughtered Native Americans, collecting ears and scalps to earn bounties. The Indian Protection Act, meanwhile, forced Native Americans and their children into servitude. Survivors were driven into reservations, but these masters of the interior were able to defy the Euro-American settlers: the Lakota still ruled the northern plains, the Comanche the Texan–Mexican borderlands of Comancheria. The Native Americans, armed with guns and horses, had intensified their hunting of bison. The Comanche alone had annually killed 280,000 of the animals, but now settlers were wiping out the herds. Among the Comanche lived the chief Peta Nocona and his wife Naduah (once known as Cynthia Ann Parker, the girl kidnapped from Fort Parker) with their son, Quanah. Quanah had no idea that his mother was white; he had been trained as a Comanche fighter by his father, whom he regularly accompanied on raids.^*

AMERICA TURNS WEST: THE KING OF HAWAII, QUEEN EMMA AND COMMODORE VANDERBILT

As thousands of Americans settled in California, the nation was drawn towards the Pacific, trading in China, infiltrating Hawaii and keen to open Japan, closed for centuries under the Tokugawa dynasty of shoguns. In July 1853 the US president Franklin Pierce dispatched a commodore, Matthew Perry, veteran of the Mexican war, to Japan to force open the closed nation. Perry sailed into Edo Bay with four heavily armed steam cruisers to demand a trade treaty with Japan at the end of a gun barrel.

In Hawaii, the reign of Kamehameha III, son of the Conqueror who had united the islands, had been dominated by the struggle between his desperate love for his sister and the influence of American missionaries.^* Hawaiian kings had often married their siblings, but the Conqueror’s widowed queens had banned sacrifices and then, in a radical reform, abolished the traditional kapu system of idolatry and converted to Christianity. They also welcomed American missionaries, who started to marry into Hawaiian families, buy estates and interfere with local sexual customs.

The young king initially devoted himself to sexual adventures with Kaomi, an ex-Christian, half-Tahitian male lover, the traditional aikane. Kamehameha appointed him co-ruler until pressure forced his removal. His real agony, however, was not his affair with Kaomi, but the great love of his life: his full sister Na¯hiʻenaʻena – luminous in her scarlet feather cloak in a portrait by the painter Robert Dampier – who was also in love with him. In Hawaiian tradition, their marriage could only strengthen the dynasty, but the missionaries managed to ban it. Married to another aristocrat, she and the king became lovers anyway and when she gave birth to a son in 1836, Kamehameha declared the child his heir.

Yet, like the Habsburgs, the family was being genetically destroyed by incestuous marriage: the child died within hours. The king was heartbroken. Na¯hiʻenaʻena died soon afterwards, aged twenty-two. When he finally married another relative, Kamala, both their children died in infancy.

The kings had always employed half-Hawaiian or European ministers. The family of John Young, the Conqueror’s gunner, played a special role. Young’s son John Young II, brought up with the king, served as his premier. But then in 1839 the premier was caught ‘fastening his pantaloons’ in the bedroom of Queen Kamala. He was sentenced to death, a penalty only commuted at the plea of the queen dowager. Amazingly John Young II remained interior minister. Kamehameha III maintained Hawaiian independence, but Americans and Europeans were increasingly interested.

In December 1854, when Kamehameha III died suddenly, his nephew, Alexander Liholiho, succeeded as Kamehameha IV.^* While he resisted American encroachment, he fell in love with another member of the Young family, a granddaughter of the Conqueror’s gunner, Emma Rooke, regarded as startlingly beautiful by both Europeans and Hawaiians. Once they had married, the couple spent much time with the king’s good-looking American secretary, Henry A. Neilson. After the queen gave birth to a son in 1858, the king started to drink and become jealous of the American: in September 1859, he shot Neilson in the chest. Neilson, grievously wounded, survived for two years during which the king tried to redeem himself by caring for him. Shortly afterwards, the couple lost their son, aged four. They were poleaxed; Emma assumed the name Flight of the Heavenly Chief.

As America turned west, a pugnacious but visionary entrepreneur, Cornelius Vanderbilt, who already operated steam-powered ferries in New York, switched to steamships, which became the fastest way to reach California: passengers would cross the Panamanian isthmus by boat and then rail, before re-embarking on his steamships to reach San Francisco. Hefty and menacing, Vanderbilt, descended from the pirate’s son Janszoom of Salee, had started working on his father’s boats, owning his first at sixteen. A superb predictor of the market and exploiter of new technologies, autocratic and harsh, dubbing himself the Commodore, he punched his enemies, bullied his family, betrayed his friends, bribed judges and politicians, manipulated the stock market and ruined his rivals: ‘I for one will never go to a court of law when I have the power in my own hands to see myself right.’ Intense and vigilant, he existed in a world of vigorous competition: ‘I’m not afraid of my enemies, but by God, you must look out when you get among your friends.’ The first American railways were built in 1827; by 1840, there were 2,700 miles of track; by 1860, there were 30,000, built, floated and controlled by aggressive entrepreneurs led by Vanderbilt, who soon joined the octogenarian Astor as the richest men in America.

In New York, the Commodore and the brash railway barons were forgiven for their wealth and invited into the refined quasi-British world of the older families in return for philanthropic donations to institutions still controlled by American aristocrats. The older families were not afraid of commerce; they were just not as good at it. The Roosevelts, descended from the first Dutch settlers, had made money in linseed oil and Manhattan property, but they also entered public life, serving as aldermen and US congressmen; they built mansions upstate and tended to marry within a genteel circle. That changed with Cornelius Van Schaack Roosevelt, born in the eighteenth century and the last Dutch-speaking member of the family, descended from Schuylers and Van Schaacks. CVS, short, red-haired, solemn and energetic, had demonstrated his spirits as a boy one Sunday by jumping on the back of a male pig, one of those that still wandered Manhattan streets at the start of the century, and riding it until it bucked him off. Aiming to become ‘a man of fortune’, he manufactured plate glass, essential for the building boom to house new immigrants, then invested in property, making over $3 million.

As CVS aged, he bought his five children houses around his mansion on East 20th Street and Broadway: one son became a congressman while the youngest, Theodore, was less interested in glass. Described by his namesake son as ‘a handsome, good-natured lion’ and ‘best man I ever knew’, Theodore funded charities and founded the Metropolitan Museum of Art. When he was nineteen, he travelled through the south where the northern Knickerbocker heir met Martha ‘Mittie’ Bulloch, a Georgian planter’s daughter, brought up at Bulloch Hall, a pillared mansion. Like all daughters of planters, she had grown up sharing her room with an enslaved companion, known as her ‘shadow’ – Lavinia, nicknamed Toy. The teenagers came from different worlds that were about to collide.

As America gained an empire, the monarchies of Europe were shaken by revolution. Twenty days after Guadalupe Hidalgo, on 22 February 1848, Parisian crowds, crying ‘Vive la réforme!’ and ‘Vive la République!’, took control of Paris – an upheaval that heralded the return of the Bonapartes and the moment when mass politics and public health remodelled family dynasty and state power to reform Europe.

* The father, a super-rich procurator, illustrated the sexual predations of the white elite, the mantuanos. Even by the standards of slave-owning rapists, he was a predator: two enslaved sisters reported to the bishop of Caracas that he regularly raped them – ‘this infernal wolf trying to take me by force and consign me to the Devil’. The bishop investigated and arranged the marriage of Don Juan Vicente, fifty years old, to Maria, a fourteen-year-old mantuano girl, who was soon pregnant – with Simón.

* All remembered the 1781 rebellion against Spanish oppression in Peru by Tupac Amaru II, an educated Amerindian descended from the Incas. He led an army of 70,000, including female fighters led by his wife, against Cuzco, massacring Spaniards. When it was crushed, 100,000 Amerindians were killed and the Inca himself had his tongue cut out, before being pulled apart by four horses and displayed on the same square in Cuzco where his great-great-great-grandfather Inca Tupac Amaru I had been executed.

* Boyer was kind to Queen Marie Louise, granting her some property. But, as she came to fear for her life, she was rescued by the Royal Navy and conveyed to London. She and her daughters Améthyste and Athénaïre stayed with Clarkson: a black queen and princesses in Regency London..

* Francia never married and loved no one but recorded his sexual partners in a book, fathering seven children. When he discovered his own illegitimate daughter Ubalda was having sex for money, he declared the nobility of prostitution, which he regulated by ordering prostitutes to wear the gold comb, sign of a respectable Spanish lady. Only in Francia’s Paraguay were sex workers honoured.

* When Jefferson retired to Monticello in 1809, the grand Virginian returned to his courtly lifestyle, cared for by his paramour Sally Hemings, who was bringing up their four children. Although one of her sisters, Thenia, had been sold to James Monroe, Jefferson had freed two of her brothers, one of whom, his French-trained chef James, he had invited to be his White House chef; James refused; later he committed suicide. As for his own enslaved children, Jefferson had the boys trained as carpenters, and Harriet as a weaver, though they also learned violin. Their training as artisans was very different from the education of white Virginians.

* In its biggest slum, Angel Meadow, families lived amid heaps of garbage and clouds of smoke. In Liverpool, home to 80,000 and Britain’s second largest city by 1800, some 60 per cent of children died before the age of five, and life expectancy was twenty-six. Even as food improved, pushing up the population (the average height of an Englishman increased by two inches between 1750 and 1900), the industrial cities – seething with TB, cholera and typhoid – were killing the new working class in vast numbers. These new industries also widened the gap between classes, and changed the shape of families. The factories required managers and clerks, a new caste, mainly male, though aided by literate female assistants, who all worked in a new location: the office. While the workers sweated on the factory floor, these managers signed papers and enforced the new timetable – the working schedule that set the pace of western urban life until the Covid pandemic of 2020. Office workers wished to show their seniority to the foreman and their proximity to the proprietor. To promote the cult of industry, now associated with virtue and status, office workers wore dark shortened jackets and trousers, a costume that became the suit. Starting as Beau Brummell’s cravats, ties – the most futile item of clothing ever invented – developed as part of the uniform of working sobriety.

* The rebellion placed Tsar Alexander in an awkward position: his entourage was filled with Greeks, and his foreign minister was the Corfiote aristocrat Ioannis Kapodistrias, who left Russian service to become the first governor of independent Greece. Not only Greeks joined the Orthodox revolt: the Serbian warlord Đorđe Petrović, known as Black George (Karađorđe) joined the Filiki Etaireia. In 1804, this sheep trader led a successful but short-lived rebellion against the Ottomans. He was assassinated in 1817 by his rival warlord, Miloš Obrenović, who had won concessions from the sultan. The two families, Obrenovići and Karađorđevići, fought for power in Serbia until 1903.

* When the foreign secretary, Viscount Castlereagh, a manic depressive, committed suicide, Byron was elated:

Posterity will ne’er survey

A Nobler grave than this:

Here lie the bones of Castlereagh:

Stop, traveller, and piss!

* Sitting at the front of the orchestra who had been instructed to follow the conductor not the composer, Beethoven ‘threw himself back and forth like a madman. He stretched to his full height … crouched down to the floor … flailed about with his hands and feet as though he wanted to play all the instruments and sing all the chorus.’ As he died in 1826, he said, like Augustus, ‘Applaud, friends, the comedy is over.’ At his funeral, crowds lined the streets of Vienna.

* The families of slave owners – including the Duke of Leutchenberg (Empress Josephine’s son Eugene) – received Haitian payments for many generations, the only case of the descendants of liberated slaves themselves forced to compensate the descendants of their own masters. In 1843, Boyer was overthrown in popular protests; Santo Domingo rebelled and fought a war of independence to create the Dominican Republic; and, paying its last instalment in 1888, Haiti took out loans from US banks that it could not service.

* Alexandre Dumas, the son of Thomas-Alexandre ‘Black Devil’ Dumas, Haitian revolutionary general, was Louis Philippe’s librarian/secretary during the 1820s and took part in the 1830 revolution. Now he started to write stories based on his father’s adventures, including his uncle’s smuggling via a small Caribbean island, Montecristo. In 1844, his novel The Count of Monte-Cristo chronicled the perils of the ever-changing regimes in France. It was published in eighteen instalments in the Journal des Debats. Dumas became one of the commercial super-novelists who benefited from improved literacy and the proliferation of reader-hungry newspapers. The sales were colossal, but thanks to juggling a family and a lifestyle that involved building a Château de Monte-Cristo and forty mistresses, the irrepressible novelist was always broke, despite hiring a stable of writers to pump out bestsellers. Dumas flourished under Louis Philippe, though constantly confronting racism about his origins. ‘My father was a mulatto, my grandfather was a Negro,’ he would reply, ‘and my great-grandfather a monkey. You see, Sir, my family starts where yours ends.’

* Balzac chronicled and rejected the horror of the new office life, an institution that dominated the days of millions in the west into the twenty-first century, fearing that as ‘a clerk, a machine … eating and drinking and sleeping at fixed hours, I should be like everyone else.’ He became, before Dickens, the first observer of the lives of clerks in his Les employés and his essay La physiologie de l’employe. ‘Bureaucracy,’ he said, ‘is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.’

* When Lord Liverpool suffered a stroke after the longest premiership of the last two centuries, the snootier grandees believed Canning could never succeed him. ‘The son of an actress is, ipso facto,’ said Earl Grey, ‘disqualified from becoming prime minister.’ But George IV appointed him. On his death after just 119 days, the next government collapsed after just 144 days and in January 1828 the king appointed Wellington.

* Such was the rancour inspired by Catholic emancipation that Wellington challenged a critic, the earl of Winchilsea, to a duel, held on 23 March 1829 in Battersea Fields. Both discharged their weapons harmlessly and honour was satisfied. This was the last prime ministerial duel.

* Louis Philippe’s lack of glamour encouraged Bonapartist dreams, centred around the heir, known as the Eaglet. In Vienna, Emperor Franz gave Napoleon’s son a regiment but prevented him from serving anywhere. On 22 July 1832 Napoleon-Franz died of TB, aged twenty-one. The young Adolf Hitler was obsessed with the duke of Reichstadt: in 1940, one of the first things he did on conquering France was to order Napoleon II’s reburial in the Invalides in Paris next to his father, as a gift to the French people.

* In 1833, this compensation formed ‘40 per cent of the government’s annual expenditure’, writes Michael Taylor, ‘and until the banking rescue package of 2008 it remained the largest specific payout in British history’. Baring Brothers initially bid to raise the vast loan, but its size was daunting. Grey turned to Nathan Rothschild and his brother-in-law Moses Montefiore, both supporters of abolition who deplored slavery as akin to the racist persecutions of Jewish people over many centuries. They regarded the raising of the loan as essential to delivering liberation, while they campaigned hard to overturn restrictions against Jews. Days after abolition passed, Parliament rejected the Jewish Civil Disabilities Repeal Bill. Britain ‘is a Christian country and a Christian legislature’, said Wellington. ‘This measure would remove that peculiar character.’

* Just after abolition, a young amateur naturalist set off on the Pacific voyage of HMS Beagle that was both imperial project and scientific inquiry. Born at the heart of the interrelated industrial families of Wedgwoods and Darwins, Charles Darwin was partly chosen for his study of marine invertebrates and partly because his wealth covered his expenses. His father Robert vetoed the trip until persuaded by his brother-in-law, the pottery king Josiah Wedgwood II. On the five-year voyage, Darwin studied the long-isolated animals of the Galapagos Islands and, noting the variety of natural life, developed the idea that ‘It is absurd to talk of one animal being higher than another.’ In 1859 he published On the Origin of Species, in which he argued, ‘As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself … will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected.’ He concluded that ‘from so simple a beginning, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved’.

* The oba of Lagos, Kosoko, a Dahomean vassal, refused to cooperate until in 1851 the Royal Navy bombarded the city and deposed him, replacing him with another ruler: the first step towards a new colony. In 1862, fear of French encroachment persuaded Palmerston to annex the city. Further west, on the Gold Coast, the Asante now used slaves to work their gold mines and plantations, many living in villages around the capital Kumasi; unlucky slaves were sacrified in annual rituals.

* The best of the Ottoman advisers was a young Prussian captain from a Danish–Mecklenburger family who would later transform war and the shape of Europe: he advised the vizier not to fight at Nezib. The vizier ignored his advice with fatal consequences. The adviser was Helmuth von Moltke, who was a very untypical Prussian officer, thoughtful, literary and cosmopolitan, author of romantic novels, history books and now his Letters from Turkey.

* When Shah Shuja was deposed as a boy, he was given asylum by the empire builder Ranjit, who demanded in return his treasured diamond, the Koh-i-Noor.

* A separate community developed of Black Seminoles – half African, half Seminole – who developed a hybrid culture combining Native American and African culture, and speaking the Gullah language, fusing west African Krio with Seminole. During the Slave Revolts of 1835, Black Seminoles joined African-American slaves in attacking plantations. Later many Black Seminoles served as scouts with the US or Mexican armies.

* In 1821, as a young officer fighting for Spain, Santa Anna switched sides to join the revolution along with a general, Agustín de Iturbide. The two manifested the contradictions of Mexico: the revolution was started by a priest of mixed race but now its leaders were white Catholic officers. Iturbide offered the Compromise of Iguala, based on three guarantees – independence, Catholicism and equality between white and mixed-race Mexicans. It would establish a monarchy, possibly Bourbon. But in October 1821 Iturbide’s victory was so heady that his backers suggested he take the crown: ‘I had the condescension – or call it weakness – of allowing myself to be seated on the throne I’d created for others.’ Iturbide was crowned Emperor Agustín but quickly faced resistance. In December 1822, the twenty-nine-year-old Colonel Santa Anna rebelled and marched on Mexico City, leading to the emperor’s exile and the creation of a republic. When Agustín returned to retake the throne, he was executed.

* Lamar’s parents named their children after their French revolutionary and Roman heroes: his brother was Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar.

* Their atrocities inspired the classic novel Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. Kirker served later as a scout for the American invasion of Mexico, then escorted 49ers (participants in the 1849 Gold Rush) into California, where he settled and died peacefully.

* Santa Anna again retreated into exile, but in 1853 he returned as dictator for life and ‘Serene Highness’, toying with the crown until forced to resign, replaced by a new sort of Mexican leader, an Amerindian Zapotec lawyer, Benito Juárez, who had once served him barefoot as a waiter. Santa Anna denounced Juárez, the ‘dark Indian’ who had ‘to be taught to wear shoes, jacket and trousers’.

* Irish famine also rearranged British politics. In 1845, a blight in Ireland destroyed the potatoes that had been, since the crop was imported from America, the staple diet of an impoverished Catholic peasantry toiling under British Protestant landlords who refused to repeal the Corn Laws that protected their grain prices. But as the famine intensified and as a million Irish people died, the Tory prime minister, Peel, joined with Gladstone and other Whigs to repeal the laws. Peel was opposed by his own party, led by an unlikely figure to represent the Tories – a novelist and dandy, born Jewish of Moroccan origins, called Benjamin Disraeli. Out of the crisis emerged the Liberals led by Palmerston and the Conservatives, soon led by Disraeli.

* A similar process was taking place in another continental settler nation, Australia. Here the conquest was easier; on the one hand, the indigenous peoples were much less organized, their resistance much less fierce, and there were no other rival European powers present. On the other hand, the settlers were less divided, untainted by slavery but deploying no less injustice, violence and bigotry. British settlers and outlaws, inspired by vast spaces and an adventurous spirit, expanded aggressively. In 1851 the discovery of gold attracted an influx of immigrants who demanded representation. In 1854, the revolt of gold miners at Ballarat, Victoria, was crushed, with twenty-seven miners killed, but it was followed by the granting of limited self-rule and universal male suffrage, with an innovation – the ‘Australian’ secret ballot, later copied throughout the world. A generation of outlaws called the Bushrangers roamed over the vast territories. Captain Thunderbolt – Fred Ward – personified the type. A labourer turned cattle rustler, Ward was arrested and sent to Cockatoo Bay, whence he escaped. During the 1860s, he launched a spree of heists, and was chased by government troopers. Admired by many as the ‘gentleman bushranger’, the bushy-bearded Thunderbolt defied capture until 1870 when, aged thirty-five, he was hunted down and shot.

* In 1819, when Kamehameha the Conqueror died, his dissipated son, Liholiho, Kamehameha II, had neglected his father’s fleet and spent a fortune on an American luxury yacht which he named Cleopatra’s Barge and on which he languished too drunk even to speak. He and his soused crew soon wrecked it – before he set off to visit George IV in Britain, where he died of measles. His brother succeeded him as Kamehameha III.

* Although he had been raised by American missionaries, Kamehameha IV loathed them – and American racism. He and his brother Lot had travelled to meet President Taylor in Washington and Queen Victoria in London. On the train to New York, ‘the conductor … took me for somebody’s servant just because I had a darker skin. Confounded fool – the first time I’ve ever received such treatment. In England an African can … sit alongside Queen Victoria’ but Americans, though they ‘talk and think a great deal about their liberty, were often remiss with strangers.’